Peter Lang Ltd
Renaissance Now!
The value of the
Renaissance Past in the Culture of Today
ed. Brendan
Dooley
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. The
Drowning Man in Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina
Sheila Barker
2. Osiris
and the End of the Renaissance
Nicola Gardini
3. Renaissance
Economies: Markets, Tastes, Representations
Heinrich Lang
4. Making
Renaissance Humanism Popular in the 15th-Century Empire
Maximilian Schuh
5. The
Two Adamastores: Diversity and Complexity in Camões’s Lusiads
Thomas Earle
6. Renaissance
que voicy: Torque in a Tower (Reading
Montaigne, Essais, III, iii)
Tom Conley
7. Fashioning
Service in a Renaissance state: The official journals of the Elizabethan
viceroys in Ireland
David Edwards
8. Cervantes
and Renaissance: A Chapter in the
History of Hispanic Studies
José Montero Reguera
9. The
Map You Cannot See: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Navigation
Chris Barrett
10. Keep
This Secret! Renaissance Knowledge
between Freedom and Restraint
Brendan Dooley
11. Popular
Atheism and Unbelief. A 17th Century Venetian point of view
Federico Barbierato
12. The
Raw and the Cooked: The Renaissance as Cultural Trope in Times of Crisis
Paul R. Wright
13. ‘Scientific
Method’ in the Early Modern Period and in Contemporary Instruction
Joseph Freedman
14. Digital
Renaissance
Brendan Dooley
Conclusion
PREFACE
"This lonely provincialism, this admission that we are just the
historical moment that we are"[i]--who among the seekers
along the pathways of the past has not experienced Richard Rorty's sense of
isolation? Stepping out of the rather narrower focus suggested by our
title, this book is concerned largely with subjects and their objects. It
queries the relations between researchers and their studies; it investigates to
what degree a certain reflexivity affects the seeker as well as the thing being
sought; it wonders where the world of yesterday fits into the world of today,
and vice versa. However hard we try, we will never fully succeed in
bringing "in here" what is "out there." Is that a
boon or a bane? "Objectivity is not neutrality," one expert
(Thomas Haskell) has said.[ii] Amen! We make
a virtue of necessity and seize the chance to remind ourselves and others about
the reasons that impelled us on our voyages of discovery and proffer our
appraisal of what we found when we got there.
Ideas about doing an anthology on “Renaissance Now!” coalesced when one
of the contributors was asked to participate in an RTE radio broadcast about
“The Borgias”—not the historical family (one of whose descendants he claimed to
have met once on a bus to Prato), but the BBC television series. Midway into an on-the-air conversation
touching the themes of anachronism, presentism, simplification, exaggeration
and outright fabrication, he reflected that Jeremy Irons was brilliant as the
patriarch of “the world’s first crime family”—whatever such a characterization
might mean or not mean in respect to a still somewhat indistinct actual episode
in recorded time. The conversation soon
turned away from history to acting, representing, creating good television,
audience expectations, mediation and remediation. The Renaissance, someone else on the
program noted, belongs to all of us, as each “now” comes back to us from
“future” and fuses into “past.” The
project became the product of many hands; and those who generously gave time
and energy to it shared a common interest in asking themselves and others how
we like our Renaissance and how we want it to be remembered.
The road has been long, also to the completion of this book. Some of the territory traversed is in
evidence here only tangentially. The
various offshoots of the original project have taken on lives of their own, and
when they are not indicated in these pages the reader may hear about them one
way or another from the personages who are. Christabel Scaife at Peter Lang Publishers
expressed interest in the project at an early stage and helped us motivate the
practical aspects of preparing a volume.
We are deeply grateful. Those of
us who did the editing are equally grateful to all our participants as much for
their expertise as for their patience.
We hope the final product meets their expectations as well as the
expectations of our readers, whoever you are, lovers of things Renaissance,
students in Renaissance courses, researchers completing bibliographies where
the present work of knowledge collection meets the past we encounter throught
the lens of our scientific skills and our imaginations.
This is the place to thank all those who made the project possible,
including many who are represented here only by reference but who played a part
in the initial discussions, namely, James Hankins, John Henderson, Alessio
Assonitis, Jeremy Laurance, Flavio Boggi, Melanie L. Marshall, Stephen Boyd,
Arpad Szakolczai, Daragh O'Connell, Jason Harris. For logistical help we
thank Esther Luettgen and Colin Duggan, in the Texts, Contexts and Cultures
Program at University College Cork, and for her expert proofreading Beatrix
Faerber. Finally, our thanks to the
Mellon Foundation, the Society for Italian Studies, and the College of Arts,
Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC and its Head, David Cox, as well as
the Schools of History (Geoff Roberts) and English (James Knowles) and the
Graduate School (David Ryan) and Vice Head of Research, Graham Allen.
Humanities research lives and thrives in a community that values
knowledge, understanding and free inquiry; and the wider we look around, the
less we feel inclined to take such things for granted. Maybe in some ways the voyage itself is
constitutive of our convictions in this regard.